The Pinnacles Desert is surrounded by gently rolling coastal dunes
My first destination after Perth was Cervantes, some 200km north up the coast and home to the incomparable Nambung National Park. It was also home to serious amounts of wind, and torrential rain. In Cervantes it was obviously payback time for all the good weather I'd been having, as it was all I could do to get the tent pegged down in time for the downpour. The rain out here comes in very short, very sharp bursts: it may only rain for one minute, but you'll be utterly soaked to the skin by the time the rain stops, and there's absolutely no warning that it's about to rain. It's just like there's someone up there with a tap, and this is the time of year he gets to play with it. Then again, this is a desert, so you can't really complain; the poor place really needs the water.
The limestone stacks of Nambung range from small and stumpy...
After spending the first night huddled inside my tent, I got up early and headed out to the park's main attraction: the Pinnacles Desert. There are mountains in Australia, but everyone's seen mountains. There are rivers, deserts, gorges, forests and lakes, and everyone's seen this sort of thing somewhere, though probably not to the scale of those in Australia. But unless you've been to the Pinnacles, you'll never have seen anything quite like it. Imagine a gently rolling, sandy desert, with the odd bit of green scrub around: it's actually a dune system, but one that's now a few kilometres inland, though the sea is visible in the distance. Now imagine over 4000 limestone stacks, ranging from tiny to about four metres high, dotted around for as far as the eye can see. These stacks are all sorts of shapes, from long and thin, to stubby, to something out of the caterpillar's hookah smoke in Alice in Wonderland. There's a suspension-challenging dirt road to the desert, and you can then take a short loop road through the desert. I drove it once, and decided it was so impressive I'd walk it.
...to many metres tall
This turned out to be a good decision. I was there in the morning while the sun was still quite low, and the shadows were quite surreal. There was also quite a lot to see off the beaten track, something the normal fly-by-night driving tourists would have missed in their hasty day trips from Perth. The rain managed to hold off for most of my visit, though I got caught in the odd shower, prompting the offer of a lift from the park ranger. I declined, but we got chatting, and he ended up inviting me on a five-day bushwalk in July up in the Pilbara, a very dry, barren area that I'm visiting in the next few weeks. Who knows, I may take him up on his offer: I've not been on a week-long hike yet, and who better to do it with than a team led by a park ranger?
On my return I got talking to my neighbour in the caravan park, a German called Andreas who was taking time off from a conference in Perth to head up the coast. He was an interesting guy: he was studying Astronomy at Sydney University, and had chosen that subject because he'd wanted to study his PhD in the southern hemisphere, as the subject of 'southern skies' he'd chosen made sure they'd have to send him to Australia – crafty fellow! We had a conversation-filled walk along the beach, followed by a trip to the pub, which set us up perfectly to travel together to Kalbarri.
